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Hello! I think you have to find that balance yourself. But the good news is most people will eventually reach some kind of ‘settlement’ with your mind over what kind of a relationship you want to have with sleep. Many people who recovered like myself tends to put it further and further down the list of priority as they get better. Yes sleep is essential but we still have to live in the moment, yes? We all have other things to take care of. For you now, it might be a new relationship, work, assignments or whatever. But if you continue to choose to engage in this futile exercise, other things will start popping up that your mind thinks will disrupt your sleep, things like marriage, moving into a new home, having kids and blah blah blah. That list will be endless and contains a million things! How are you gonna to entertain all that? Can’t you see how futile this is? Your mind is playing tricks with you and you are falling into it. So when is this nonsense going to stop? Well it won’t stop because you just can’t let it go! You are feeding your insomnia with your attention and making decisions based on how they affect your sleep. My advice is, sleep with your boyfriend now, get used to it here and now. Stop avoiding things because sleep and start being brave. Only then will you be free from the struggles which is entirely self imposed. Good luck! Dismantle the fear around poor sleep and you begin realizing what insomnia is really all about. Just a set of thoughts and how you relate to them. Good luck!
It seems you have made sleep the centre of attention for everything that you live for. And that’s an issue because it doesn’t have to be that way and it’s all entirely made up by your overprotective mind. Maybe you need to ask yourself, what is it about losing sleep that I’m so afraid of, that I can’t continue to enjoy my life to the fullest without. The reality is that sleep doesn’t define who you are or what you are capable of. There will be a time when everyone sleeps eternally, so perhaps ask yourself why you need to be missing it so badly now already? Is sleep really that important compared to what’s going on in your life? How you use your time is really the issue here. So you can spend way more time in bed trying to sleep, or would you rather like to go out and do the things that you really want and enjoy. At the end, how do you want to remember your life? How you slept or how you lived? The choice is entirely yours. Best wishes.
Stare down deep inside you and ask what is it you are so afraid of? If your “mind still intrudes with, you’re just doing that to make me go away.” Well, does it have to go away? Allow yourself to have intrusions but you can also choose how you respond to them. If you are not bothered to take any action and you attach less and less meaning to them, then thoughts don’t matter to you regardless of where they reside. Your body has demonstrated it can sleep, almost every night. The proof is already there! What else do you need? So what if you can’t sleep for a night or two? Life still goes on and sleep will eventually return, it always has. Accept thoughts as just mind noise, they mean absolutely nothing unless you take them way too seriously.
Ultimately, you have to accept that whatever sleep you are getting has to be the one that your body needs for that moment, regardless of circumstances. Stop chasing sleep, let it chase you. Stop making great sleep (whatever great sleep means to you) a goal for every night, if you slept badly, fine just get on with your life. If you keep paying attention to it, it becomes like dealing with a spoilt brat.
Sleep is not a worry anyone should be overly concerned about. It takes care of itself if you just let it. Sticking to a regular sleep timetable is all that’s needed and your body will do the rest. It’s when you actively try to intervene or control sleep, believing something is wrong when there isn’t, that insomnia persists. It would be like force feeding yourself 10000 calories a day or breathing 400x a minute, because you became convinced more is better and something horrible will happen if you don’t do this. Just let your body decide how much it needs. The only things you can do are indirect things such as ensuring a good environment for sleep, regular hours, keeping yourself happily engaged during your wakeful hours and not stressing over sleep. Good luck!
Hello @umbra
Great! If you have this luxury then you can go to bed based on how sleepy you feel. Nobody said you need to stick a timetable except yourself, of course. Only you can judge yourself. Sleeping when really sleepy is a very natural instinct, animals do it all the time and everyone seems very happy. By sticking to a timetable, you only make it likelier to feel sleepy by a certain each night. It does nothing to your ability to sleep nor guarantee that sleep will happen. So if you are okay not feeling sleepy and staying up, don’t mind not sleeping by a certain time each night, are not stressed over it, and know that eventually you will sleep, then congratulations! It means you have overcome your insomnia and insomnia doesn’t have control over you anymore.
Hello @umbra
That is an interesting question. I think the best advice is try to go back to the times when you were sleeping without any problems, pre-insomnia. What time were you sleeping back then? Then work out your new schedule based from that or close to it. But ultimately, this is a your personal question and I hope you can start seeing that as such. It’s kind like asking which shoe size (7.5-8.5) you should buy if you normally wear an 8. The answer is whatever makes you feel good, give everything a test drive first and then makes changes as you go along. You won’t just be sleeping for one night only, surely this is not “do or die”. Good luck!
Thank you @cat_ncsu. I appreciate your kind comment.
The key isn’t to find a way to not give insomnia too much attention. On the contrary, it is allowing these thoughts some space to exist, but attaching a lot less meaning to them because they mean nothing to you anymore.
You can’t control when and how many times you wake up either. Be realistic with your goals. Do you think following cbti devoutly was going to make to sleep straight 10pm-530am every single night? Were you already sleeping like this before insomnia? Be perfectly honest with yourself. In sleep, the end result is not the ultimate goal here, because nobody can control that directly but we can influence the things that help make sleeping easier, such as getting in and out of bed at regular times, a wind down period before bed, creating a good environment for rest and overall, not stressing over it. To achieve that final step, you have to completely abandon all attachments and goal settings. In this mindset, the sleep you want becomes the sleep you get, there is no more distinction between them. Good luck!
No, not really. Of course, you may be excited, and your brain gets stimulated during game play. But if you have a healthy sleep drive which is the result of being awake long enough, all that is going to kick in when you rest quietly and you will start feeling sleepy.
Using a sleep window increases the likelihood of feeling sleepy by a certain time every night because it helps to realign your body clock. But that said, the answer is no, you don’t have to stick to a strict sleep window. You can work with a range too! Say, going to bed sometime between 11 and midnight while keeping your out of bed times pretty consistent. That’ll still work! Most normal people do that anyways. Nobody really wants to follow a set of strict rules forever, really. Because that’s not living, but a self-imposed curfew. Go ahead and live your life! Stop making sleep the center of it all because ultimately, in the end, when you look back at your life, what do you want to remember? How you lived your life or how you slept? Good luck!
Hello and welcome to this forum!
My ultimate advice is try not to lose sleep over sleep. Easier said than done, I know, but perfectly doable because I and many others have done it. Get into a regular sleep schedule, this is really important to get your real sleep back on track. The other will be the mental or not so real aspect, it’s that fear over no/poor sleep and how they affect your real sleep. Ultimately, there’s really no connection between them although it will require a bit more work and time to overcome. Please go through the material here and you will start seeing the bigger picture of what insomnia is all about. Good luck and best wishes!
Hello Kyle!
Welcome to this forum and sorry to hear about your struggles. What you are going through is very common. As a recovered person, I am telling you up-front that sleep or lack of it has nothing to do with your health. It’s all entirely concocted by your brain to try to protect you but unfortunately, it’s wrong advice. And it’s misguided, erroneous info that you somehow bought into.
The biological process of sleep is very similar to eating and breathing. To your body, they are no different. The question really is can you accidentally starve yourself of sleep to death or into having the terrible health consequences that you described. In a similar way, you could ask yourself if you can accidentally starve yourself of oxygen or nourishment to death. The answer is unequivocally no because you will instinctively eat when hungry or breathe when you hold your breath long enough. Your body does all this for you. The act of going to bed is similar to putting food in your mouth or inhaling. These are all natural instinctive behaviors that requires no conscious intervention. The ability to sleep is an innate and inherent nature in all of us. Just like the ability to eat or breathe.
That said, so what can you do to get your sleep on track? Frankly, it’s really quite easy. Just set a time to get into and out of bed. That’s it. If your sleeping hours are out of whack due to horrendous sleep anxiety, by doing this, your body will get used to the schedule and it will respond accordingly.
Understand there are two distinct issues here. First is the actual insomnia, this is quite easy to fix, just by having a regular sleep schedule. The other is entirely psychological, or the mental aspect of insomnia and the scary thoughts and behaviors behind it. They both may seem interconnected but are really independent. Your ability to sleep is not affected by thoughts and likewise, anxiety doesn’t cause insomnia, in a strict sense. Tackling the mental aspect will be a huge part of the effort to get over insomnia. Your brain will repeatedly try to warn you about the dangers of not sleeping. Try to cultivate yourself into convincing yourself that this is all just noise. The general remedy is to not run away or escape from anxiety but to welcome and anticipate it and see what it is really all about. Over time, you will start getting desensitized because nothing remotely as bad or horrendous is really happening at all. Towards the end of your recovery, you start realizing it’s all just a set of thoughts and how you relate to them. You then get into a much better position to handle insomnia when it happens and it will no longer bother you that much.
Also try not to struggle when waking up during the night and being okay with night time wakefulness. If you have further questions, reach out to us here and we will try to help you. Good luck and best wishes!
So you slept well for six years while on medication? This proves your sleep is not broken, because medications can never generate sleep, it’s your own body that did it all along. You were just misled to believe you were dependent on it. The likely reason you slept is because you felt safer after you have ‘delegated’ the task of sleep to something else and can now heave a sigh of relief. You tried less and taking pills stopped your mind from the pondering and overthinking.
Two weeks is just a breeze, continue sticking to your sleep schedule and your sleep should improve. Sleep is a constant state of charge and discharge, to feel sleepy, you have to accumulate sleep debt first which means being awake long enough. Your emotions will settle down after some time or you get exposed to poor sleep and realise nothing really bad is happening anyways then you start becoming desensitized and immune. Good luck!
